YSK that apart from not having a car and voting, the single greatest thing you can do for the climate is simply eating less red meat.

Red meat has a huge carbon footprint because cattle requires a large amount of land and water.

https://sph.tulane.edu/climate-and-food-environmental-impact-beef-consumption

Demand for steaks and burgers is the primary driver of Deforestation:

https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2022-beef-industry-fueling-amazon-rainforest-destruction-deforestation/

https://e360.yale.edu/features/marcel-gomes-interview

https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2023-06-02/almost-a-billion-trees-felled-to-feed-appetite-for-brazilian-beef

If you don't have a car and rarely eat red meat, you are doing GREAT 🙌🙌 �*

Sure, you can drink tap water instead of plastic water. You can switch to Tea. You can travel by train. You can use Linux instead of Windows AI's crap. Those are great ideas. But, don't drive yourself crazy. If you are only an ordinary citizen, remember that perfect is the enemy of good.

You're viewing a single thread.

850 comments

your tulane link is not exactly good science. it relies on Clark (2019) which itself relies on Poore-Nemecek (2018). Poore & Nemecek built their data by combining LCA studies, a practice which is specifically discouraged by the studies themselves and the guidance on LCA studies generally. we can't really rely on those conclusions at all.
they also rely on Behrens (2017), which shares a problem with poore-nemecek, though a more nuanced one: they myopically distill data from input-output to calculate environmental impacts like water and land use and ghge. this seems reasonable at first blush, but in fact it overlooks the complexity of our agricultural systems. for instance, one of the things farmers feed cattle is cottonseed. cotton is grown for textiles, and the seed is largely waste product. feeding it to cattle is a conservation of resources, and doing so should in no way count against the land, water, and ghge statistics for cattle.
but that's not really here or there, as it turns out, because the thrust of the paper is not "these foods are bad for the environment" or "these foods are good for the environment". the actual claim made in the paper is "there is not actually sufficient data sources available to determine which foods have which impacts".

850 comments